Document production environments, such as print shops, convert printing orders, such as print jobs, into finished printed material. A print shop may process print jobs using resources such as printers, cutters, collators and other similar equipment. Typically, resources in print shops are organized such that when a print job arrives from a customer at a particular print shop, the print job can be processed by performing one or more production functions.
Scheduling architectures that organize print jobs arriving at a document production environment and route the print jobs to autonomous cells are known in the art and are described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,051,328 to Rai et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 7,065,567 to Squires et al., the disclosures of which are incorporated by reference in their entirety. Methods for distributing jobs to a receiver on a network using devices are known in the art and are described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,513,126 to Harkins et al., the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference in its entirety.
It is common for print shops to receive print jobs having variable job sizes. Problems arise when a wide distribution of job sizes exists. This may be referred to as a heavy-tailed distribution. Typically, print jobs are routed to autonomous cells by associating a print function of each print job to print devices in autonomous cells with the objective of minimizing the maximum makespan across all autonomous cells. However, processing heavy-tailed distributions in this manner often causes delays, inefficiencies and poor print shop performance. Print shops are not configured to account for these large jobs, and these large jobs are not routed in a manner that assures the best use of print shop resources.